Three to Get Ready #1: The Destinations

This is the first in a series of posts that provides one dad's reflections on the last three months of his daughter's club volleyball career. They will appear every Friday until the JVDA championships in Louisville, Kentucky.

In exactly three months, an up ref will whistle a play dead and signal that a volleyball has landed in or out, that someone has mishandled a set or that some other infraction has occurred. The ref will then decisively cross forearms, signaling the official end of my daughter's club volleyball career. Her team will then either leap triumphantly or shuffle to the end line and wait for the appropriate signal to begin slapping hands and saying "good game" to the opposing team.

I can see this moment coming. I'm just not sure I'm ready for it.

Well, I have three months to get ready, three months to prepare myself and hope my daughter is doing the same, three months to reflect on the things I'll never forget about club volleyball.

I'd like to start with the destinations. There's a current ad campaign that combines multiple place names into a single destination. The point is to show that our lives are moving so fast it feels as though we're everywhere at once. With a nod to that campaign, it does sometimes feel as though club volleyball has taken our family to a place that can only be called Minnesaltlantaville.

But that's not entirely accurate.

What club volleyball has actually done is to take us to many admittedly similar, but still very distinct, locations across the country, each with its own sites to see, local culture to absorb and residents to observe. And whether it's walking through Salt Lake City's Temple Square or splashing through the fountains at Atlanta's Centennial Park, the positive effect of this travel is that our family now has a fuller appreciation that Wisconsin is not the center of the universe.

This is not to slight Wisconsin or its own rich cultural traditions. It is to say that we now have a perspective that can't be easily duplicated. If it weren't for club volleyball, we would never have traveled to the outskirts of Indianapolis to see the college basketball hall of fame or the Wilbur Wright museum. We would never have visited the Alamo and reflected on the brave few who had died there. We would never have stopped in Dallas at the spot where JFK was shot. And along the way, we have had the privilege of observing and interacting with people we would never have met otherwise.

When I reflect on club volleyball, I can't help but think about these destinations. And it makes me grateful that my family has had the opportunity to visit not some fictitious place called Minnesaltlantaville, but many actual cities like Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, Atlanta and, all too soon, Louisville.

Next Week: The Third Games